New evidence stirs doubt over murder convictions

Thirteen years after four Chicago teenagers were convicted of the rape and murder of a Rush University medical student, new evidence--including DNA tests--raises the possibility that the wrong men were imprisoned, according to a Tribune investigation.

Over the past three months, key witnesses have recanted and scientific expert testimony has been discredited. Perhaps most damaging, new DNA tests filed in court Tuesday show that semen recovered from the victim's body came from only one man--a finding that, with other tests, indicates that someone other than the four defendants sexually assaulted the woman.

Two of the four defendants have told the Tribune they falsely confessed to the crime and implicated the others--one to avoid a life sentence and the other because he believed Chicago police when they allegedly told him he could go home if he gave them a statement.

Two other prosecution witnesses have said in interviews that they testified falsely at trial. One said he lied to try to collect a $35,000 reward. The other said he traded his testimony in an effort to get a reduced sentence on a burglary conviction.

Finally, in another puzzling element of the case, the alleged confessions mirror a scenario that a top crime profiler for the FBI said he gave police before detectives made their arrests. Those defendants now say that police gave them the information to study and that they repeated it in court-reported statements under duress.

Taken together, the Tribune's findings and the preliminary DNA test results, filed in Cook County Circuit Court on Tuesday by defense attorney Kathleen Zellner, call into question whether the four defendants were wrongly convicted and whether the real killer of medical student Lori Roscetti got away.

Omar Saunders, Calvin Ollins and his cousin Larry Ollins are serving life terms for Roscetti's rape and murder. Marcellius Bradford was given a 12-year term in exchange for his cooperation. He was paroled but later convicted of burglary and sent back to prison.

The Tribune's three-month investigation of the Roscetti case included a review of more than 3,000 pages of police reports and trial transcripts as well as interviews with police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, the four defendants, witnesses and others involved in the case.

The investigation was prompted by a conclusion by nationally recognized DNA expert Dr. Ed Blake that one of the prosecution's key witnesses--a Chicago crime lab analyst--had committed "scientific fraud" in her trial testimony.

That analyst--Pamela Fish--was a central figure in the wrongful convictions of three other men who since have been exonerated by DNA testing. Fish now is the supervisor of biochemistry at the Illinois State Police lab in Chicago.

In the Roscetti case, Fish's scientific findings were crucial, both in terms of driving the police investigation and shaping the way prosecutors presented their case.

About a month after Roscetti's murder, Fish told police that tests she conducted determined that the semen was from someone with Type O blood who was also a "secretor," meaning their blood type could be determined from saliva and other body secretions, not just from their blood.

But according to tests conducted by the Chicago police crime lab and passed on to police and prosecutors before any of their trials, the four teens were all non-secretors--a fact played down by prosecutors and Fish at trial, according to the trial transcripts.

"This case represents a real miscarriage of justice," Zellner, who represents the four defendants and also has been investigating the case, said Tuesday. "The murderer here is free. There hasn't been any justice for Lori Roscetti, and there has been a great injustice for my clients."

Police and prosecutors said they believe they convicted the right people.

"It didn't seem like, given the two defendants' statements, given the extent of the investigation, that somehow all of these four guys were totally innocent--that police framed them," said Patrick O'Brien, who prosecuted the case as an assistant Cook County state's attorney and now is in private practice.

"You never want to get the wrong guy," he added. "It's the worst thing in the world for them, it's the worst thing in the world for the victim's family, plus you've got the right guy still out there."

The crime

Roscetti was last seen driving to her West Side apartment about 1 a.m. on Oct. 18, 1986, after studying for exams at Rush University's medical college. Four hours later, a Chicago & North Western Railway officer found her body on a desolate access road that stretched from Loomis Street to Ashland Avenue between 16th Street and 15th Place, in the shadows of the ABLA Homes public housing development.

The scene was horrific. The body of the second-year student was sprawled on the ground. Her face was almost destroyed by a chunk of concrete. An autopsy would later note that she had been kicked so hard and so many times that nearly all her ribs were fractured. A bloody shoe print was left on her chest.

Tests determined that Roscetti also had been sexually assaulted.

Nothing at the scene directly connected the four defendants to the murder. Two hairs, recovered from the front seat of the car, were described by a police expert as likely coming from an African-American--although the most the analyst could say was that the hairs were "similar" to two of the defendants. There were few fingerprints on the car, and none of them matched the defendants'.

The car, according to police reports, was "surprisingly clean" of fingerprints, even though detectives theorized that Roscetti's assailants opened the doors of her car, wrestled her into the back seat and drove to the train trestle. There, police said, the car trunk was opened, tools were removed and strewn about and Roscetti was sexually assaulted.

Initially, police focused on Roscetti's friends and acquaintances, seeking to give them lie-detector tests and blood tests. They quickly ruled them out as suspects, even though some refused to cooperate.

By mid-November, after crime lab analyst Fish delivered the results of her blood tests, police began eliminating potential suspects who were not Type O secretors, according to police reports chronicling the investigation.

At the time, DNA testing was in its infancy in the United States. Although it was starting to gain a foothold as scientifically reliable in various parts of the country, it was not performed in the Chicago police crime laboratory.

Instead, semen from sexual assault victims generally was tested to identify the presence of an antigen that is only present in individuals who are secretors. Humans fall into two categories--secretors and non-secretors. The blood types of secretors can be determined by testing not only their blood, but by testing any of their secretions, such as saliva, sweat and semen. The blood types of non-secretors can be determined only by testing their blood.

More than two dozen individuals were fingerprinted in a failed effort to try to match the few prints left on the car. Many were given polygraph tests and, according to police reports, some failed. Among them was one man whom police charged but quickly released "for lack of evidence."

For several weeks, any individual who didn't fit the profile of a Type O secretor was eliminated--at least until the four were arrested, according to reports.

By the second week of January 1987, police seemed stumped. They had assembled every police report of sexual assault, burglary and robbery in the neighborhood in the months before the murder to try to pinpoint possible suspects. The list at that point contained 87 names.

A profile?

On Jan. 12, according to the reports, Harrison Area detectives contacted Lt. Tom Cronin, who had recently attended classes at the FBI academy in Quantico, Va. There, he had studied crime profiling under Robert Ressler, then considered one of the top profilers in the country. He asked for Ressler's help.

Ressler said in an interview that he concluded from a review of police reports and crime scene photos that Roscetti had pulled up to a stoplight and "some people had blocked the car, and one had pulled a door, which happened to be open, even though she had thought it was locked. These people then forced her to drive to the somewhat isolated location, where they had raped, killed and robbed her."

The incident was gang-related, he said, and advised detectives to look for "black youths, somewhere between three and six males, ranging in age from 15 to 20, who would have previously been in jail and who lived close by the scene of the abduction and the railroad trestle where Roscetti had been killed."

Ressler, who chronicled his role in the case in a four-page passage of his 1992 book "Whoever Fights Monsters," said that his information helped police refocus the investigation.

Bradford, Saunders and Larry Ollins were among the teenagers living at ABLA who fit Ressler's profile. All three had been arrested and spent time in juvenile facilities. And Bradford and Ollins had been arrested three weeks after Roscetti's murder for breaking into boxcars on the tracks where her body was found.

Bradford and Larry Ollins were brought in for questioning on Jan. 27. It was the second time detectives questioned Ollins.

Shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Jan. 28--more than 15 hours after Bradford was brought to the station--police said he confessed, implicating himself and Larry Ollins, as well as Larry's 14-year-old cousin, Calvin, who lived in Cabrini-Green. The motive, according to police, was robbery so that Calvin could get bus fare to get home.

Officers immediately went to Cabrini and rousted Calvin from bed. Several hours after he was brought to the station, Calvin, a learning-disabled teen who had attended special classes, also confessed, police said.

Records show their confessions bear striking similarities to the profile Ressler said he gave to police before their arrests.

In recent interviews, Cronin, now the chief of police in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and James Maurer, then the Harrison Area violent crimes commander, contended that Ressler did not provide a profile. There is no mention in police reports of Ressler giving police a profile, and Ressler says his profile was delivered orally.

"That was a big, heater case. It was solved by good old-fashioned police work," Cronin said.

Said Maurer, now deputy chief of the Belmont Area: "Ressler never did anything in this case. We already had the people in custody."

Ressler, in an interview, said he had no reason to lie, and suggested the police might not want to share credit.

"It would be understandable if Chicago police wanted to take more credit. Let's face it, cops don't like to say they went to someone else for help," said Ressler, now a police consultant based in Virginia. "This helped them."

The confessions

Bradford and Calvin Ollins give similar accounts of how police obtained the alleged confessions from them--and both echo those told by other suspects later exonerated by DNA or other circumstances.

Bradford, in an interview at Downstate Robinson Correctional Center that was monitored by prison officers, said that his confession was false. The details, he said, came from detectives who came to him with a piece of paper.

"They tell me to read this over for a couple of hours and we'll be back," Bradford said in the interview. "I'm reading this paper and it didn't make no sense. Wouldn't nobody believe I said these things. It was a statement, handwritten.... They told me, `We want you to study this and there's a lady [an assistant state's attorney] who's going to come in here and we want you to tell her that you did this. We're going to let you go home then.'"

He said he falsely implicated himself and the others because police beat him during his interrogation--a claim his family also made just after his arrest when they said they saw him bruised.

"They handcuffed me to this ring.... Every time the door opened, it seemed like somebody [would] come in there and beat me," he said. "I'm tired, sleepy, hungry, can't use the bathroom. They give me a can to use for the bathroom. They sit down--`Tell me what happened, how you killed her.' Kill who? I said. `You know who,' they said."

Calvin Ollins, described by defense witnesses and his lawyers as mentally retarded and having an IQ between 65 and 70, denied involvement at his trial. At sentencing, he told Judge Christy Berkos, "I want to say that I was found guilty for something that I didn't do. And I always tell myself that I will be out one day and that God will do something for me. I'm asking you today to be light for me, not to give me too much time and that's all."

Calvin Ollins spends his days working in the mattress factory at the Joliet Correctional Center. He has lived more than half of his life behind bars.

"The police kept asking me whether or not I knew anything about a crime that took place," he recalled. "I kept telling them, `No, I didn't.' They kept telling me my cousin [Larry Ollins] said I was there when the crime take place. I told them he couldn't be telling the truth because I wasn't there.

"So, they took me out to another room where he also was handcuffed to a wall and showed me that they had him," Calvin Ollins said. "So I was convinced in my mind that he was telling them that I was there--but at the same time, I was wondering how could that be, because I didn't commit no crime like that. But [the police] kept telling me ... we'll let you go home if you sign a statement."

He described how detectives brought him a piece of paper already written out. "They had me to repeat it over and over for a long period," Calvin Ollins said. "They basically gave me their own idea, their own picture, of exactly what took place at the crime scene--everything from point A to point B."

Ultimately, Bradford said he agreed to testify against Larry Ollins in return for a reduced prison term. Calvin Ollins had already been convicted and sentenced to life in prison, as had Saunders.

By the time of trial, Bradford's testimony had changed substantially from his court-reported statement. He enhanced his information to include a claim that he told the others not to ejaculate during their sexual assaults and that he had worn paper bags over his hands to keep from leaving fingerprints--testimony he now says was false.

"I figured like this," Bradford said. "I was 17. If I go to trial, they're going to find me guilty. I'd rather take the 12 years and get out when I'm 23 than get convicted."

Trial testimony

Fish's testimony also loomed large at the trials. With scant physical evidence, prosecutors O'Brien and George Velcich faced what seemed a daunting task--persuading jurors to look past the contradiction between Fish's test results and the fact that the four defendants were non-secretors.

According to Blake's analysis, which was conducted at Zellner's request, Fish misrepresented her findings several times. Even when defense lawyers challenged her, trial transcripts show that Fish linked the defendants to the crime when the testing did not.

Never did O'Brien or Velcich elicit from Fish during her direct testimony the critical fact that the semen in Roscetti was from a secretor and the defendants were non-secretors.

As a result, the burden fell to defense lawyers to bring out that information, sometimes in a clumsy fashion and always in a way that prosecutors could portray as attempts to confuse jurors with complicated science.

In Ollins' trial, Fish misrepresented her findings even when sharply questioned, Blake said. Defense attorney Tom Allen, now a Chicago alderman, asked Fish if Larry Ollins should have been ruled out. Fish said no.

The only possible answer, Blake said, was "yes."

Blake noted in his analysis, "It is scientifically unsupportable to claim that Larry Ollins is the only person who could produce semen with these genetic characteristics."

In Calvin Ollins' trial, Fish was asked to describe the results of her tests on a vaginal swab from Roscetti. "I came to the conclusion that the semen present on that vaginal swab could have come from Calvin Ollins," she said.

But according to Blake, that testimony was false because the state of testing was such that the only semen Fish could have identified came from a secretor and she knew that Calvin Ollins was a non-secretor.

Fish, reached at the lab on Tuesday, referred questions to a state police spokesman. The spokesman, Dave Sanders, declined to comment, citing a lawsuit in another case in which Fish's testimony has been challenged.

Moreover, authorities never explained the source of the semen, raising the possibility that someone else raped the victim. Police and prosecutors said then that any suggestion of a fifth person was "fiction" because, according to the alleged confessions, only four individuals were involved.

New tests and recantations

Spurred by Blake's report, Zellner and prosecutors agreed to send the evidence in the case to an independent lab in Canada for DNA testing. The recent DNA tests also support the defendants' claims and discredit the confessions, which say that only the four teens took part in the attack on Roscetti and that three of them sexually assaulted her.

The tests show that the semen came from one man, rather than more than one. Coupled with the other evidence, the tests show that the four defendants could not be the source of the semen. Moreover, the genetic profile of the semen is so unique that it would occur in an estimated one in 8 trillion people, and so would not likely be confused with any of the defendants.

"Thus," the report says, "it is unlikely that more than one human has ever possessed the genotype array possessed by the sperm source from the Roscetti vaginal swab."

Although Fish's tests that determined the defendants were non-secretors have not been questioned, additional DNA testing to compare the DNA found in Roscetti with the suspects' DNA is expected to be completed in the next few weeks. Tests also are being conducted on Roscetti's underwear. Fish's test on the underwear showed the presence of semen from a Type O secretor as well.

Two other witnesses were critical to the state's case, and both told the Tribune in recent interviews that they lied during the trials.

Sam Busch, 37, is now serving a life prison sentence in Alamo, Ga., after being convicted of a series of armed robberies and shootings in that state. Busch testified at Saunders' trial that before Saunders surrendered to police, he admitted taking part in the crime. Busch now says that testimony was untrue.

"What started out to be a chance at a reward ended up in testimony to convict an innocent man," Busch told the Tribune. "I was afraid that the detectives would put fake charges on me, so I cooperated."

Anthony Gilty said in an interview that he testified against Larry Ollins only after police threatened to charge him with the crime and then prosecutors offered him leniency on a pending burglary case. At trial, Gilty said that he bumped into Larry Ollins at a party and that Ollins admitted being involved in the murder.

"They were talking about giving me the case," he said. "They were twisting my words, making it like I really said something when I didn't."

After serving nearly 6 years of his 12-year sentence, Bradford was released in 1992, but not before suffering a stroke while imprisoned in Danville. He returned to prison in 1998 on a burglary conviction and is scheduled to be paroled in June. He turns 32 that month and already seems far older--speaking deliberately and at times painstakingly slow.

He struggles daily with the guilt of giving false testimony.

"I am ready to go back to court and admit I lied," he said. "I am willing to go the whole nine yards. I think about this every day--and I will skateboard into hell."

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